Toolkit: How to Arrange an eLearning Review

“Having tried Review My eLearning with a couple of my clients so far, I have received very good feedback that the site has
proven easy to use and has all the features they were seeking. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be using this option with more and more
of my clients. “

When creating eLearning, it’s crucial that you include an eLearning
review step before you post a new or revised offering for general use. You
should choose your reviewers carefully, and include one or more of these key
individuals:

The subject
matter expert should be ensuring that every aspect of the content is
accurate

The eagle-eyed
copy editor is excellent at noting typos, misspellings, and grammar and
syntax problems

The functionality
expert will patiently check every interaction and navigation option

Other reviewers you may want to include might be the project
manager, those funding the project, and anyone else who could prove beneficial
in catching problems earlier rather than after the project is finished.

The three market-leading tools—Adobe Captivate, Articulate
Storyline, and Trivantis Lectora—all include an ability to send your eLearning
out for review and receive comments back from reviewers so that you can act on
them, either internally or through the use of a separate tool they offer. Many other
authoring tools also include this ability.

Review My eLearning

The review tools that authoring tools offer, or that their vendors offer, can be very useful; or you may
find them lacking in some ways. If the latter, consider Review My eLearning, a robust review option that includes many features.

You can choose to upload your SCORM-enabled course zip file
or link to your course. There is no size limit on the upload.

Next, you input the email addresses of the developers, and
also the email addresses of all the reviewers you would like. You can include a
message to them if you wish.

Along the way, there are helpful demos that illustrate all
of the available options. Some of those options include:

Letting reviewers access the course without
logging in or forcing them to log in.

Creating a new review cycle for an existing
course. All comments are preserved for each review cycle you establish.

Setting an expiration date for each review cycle.

You can white-label the review so that it uses your logo and
organization information, making it appear seamless with your course. The email
sent to reviewers will also include this information.

Reviewers, developers, uploaders, and account owners each
have a set of privileges, which you can see here.

Entering review comments

Reviewers will receive an invitation to review the
course, and they are offered a helpful short tour if they wish to learn all
their options. Once they start the review, they see a split screen: the course
on one side and the comment area on the other. They can choose to see the two
parts side by side (Figure 1) or with the course on top and the comments below (Figure
2). You can adjust the dividing line at will.

Figure 1:
Side-by-side review option

Figure 2: Top-and-bottom review option

In most cases, Review My eLearning is smart enough to load
the slide number and title, as you can see in the figures above (48: Pt Centered Care 7). Each comment
can be up to 3,000 characters.

You can indicate the type of error found by clicking one or more
checkboxes, as you can see in Figure 3.

Figure 3:
Review classification options

Reviewers can exit at any time and indicate that they have
finished their review or that they intend to finish later.

Viewing the review comments

You can review course comments and act on them in the
same way that reviewers do, moving from one slide to another. See Figure 4.

Figure 4: Acting
on review comments

The actions, shown magnified in Figure 5, include:

Responding to a review comment using up to 1,000
characters

Approving the comment or not

Assigning the comment to be acted upon to a
specific developer

Setting the status to Pending, Declined, or Complete

Figure 5: Acting on comments

You can also choose to see all comments at once and act on
them accordingly. See Figure 6.

Figure 6:
Seeing and acting on all the comments

You can also export the comments as an XLS file, a
comma-delimited file that can be imported into Excel, a database, and other
applications.

Notice the filtering options above on the right, magnified
in Figure 7.

Figure 7:
Options to filter the All Comments list

These options include seeing comments:

That are assigned to everyone or to specific
developers

That are new, pending, declined, or complete

By everyone or by specific reviewers

By slide number, slide title, status, date
created, and more

By the title or any word in the body of a
comment

By the label assigned to a course

Compatibility

You can use Review My eLearning with courses created in most
authoring tools, but it works best and is able to extract the most information
from the course if it was created in one of the following tools:

Articulate

Presenter ’09

Presenter ’13

Storyline 1

Storyline 2

Storyline 360

Presenter 360

Adobe

Captivate 7

Captivate 8

Captivate 9

Captivate 2017

Presenter

Lectora

iSpring

Udutu

SCORM Driver

Pricing

There are a few different plans available, depending on
your level of need.

Small
(Budget): Upload one course, $15/month or $150/year—only you can upload

Medium
(Flexible): Upload five courses, $29/month or $290/year—only you can upload

Large
(Team): Upload 20 courses, $59/month or $590/year—you and three others can
upload

Unlimited
(Enterprise): upload unlimited courses, $99/month or $990/year—you and five
others can upload

Final thoughts

Having tried Review My eLearning with a couple
of my clients so far, I have received very good feedback that the site has
proven easy to use and has all the features they were seeking. I’m pretty sure
that I’ll be using this option with more and more of my clients. Check
it out and see if you agree!

This month, Joe comments on the ongoing death of the Flash format, and he provides a thorough review of Course
Inspector, a tool for swatting bugs in your eLearning. Inspector works with any SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 published
output from six popular authoring tools. In this review, you get a complete walk-through of Inspector’s features.

In March of this year, Joe got you started on the process to identify the learning tool(s) that best match your instructional
design needs. This month, he completes the process with a list of the exact questions you need to ask tool vendors!

It’s a question that Joe gets asked all the time at conferences, in classes that he teaches, maybe even by strangers on the
street: What is the best eLearning tool? You probably know the answer, but Joe has some questions for you that will help you
make your decision.